Twenty-Five Bundles of Battens: The Roof Gets Its Grid

Day twenty-five, second entry — the tiling contractor’s crew arrived, and phase one of the new roof went on in a single day.

The batten grid. Before a single tile can be laid, the roof needs moksang — a lumber lattice fixed over the clay bed that gives every tile a straight, level bearing. Three workers (two specialists, one helper) ran the entire roof in a day, consuming 25 bundles of daruki battens. This grid is the mediation layer between the house’s reality — seventy years of undulating, hand-packed clay — and the tile’s requirement: geometry. Watching the crew snap lines across our lumpy roof and shim it into a true plane was watching decades of sag get argued out of existence.

Plastering with hired hands. Below, the eave-rafter plastering continued with our Karrot helper on the trowels — four hours at ₩15,000/hour. The gaps between eave rafters swallowed cement at a startling rate: three full bags of X18 today. This was deliberately rough first-coat work; where a void was too deep to fill in one pass, we left the surface coarse — building a shelf for the next coat to grip rather than chasing prettiness that wouldn’t last.

The lesson we paid for twice. The batten crew’s boots produced exactly what we should have predicted: new holes in the ceiling below. So the patching ritual ran again — our established method, foam plus batten offcuts (the daruki scraps now joining the recycling program). The sequencing lesson is written in wasted hours: on an old hanok, ceiling repair belongs after all roof-walking is done, not before. And on materials: urethane foam plus scrap lumber beat traditional clay mortar for this job every time we compared.

Tomorrow: tiles.